Android’s Emergency SOS just gave one Pixel owner my worst privacy nightmare – here’s how to avoid similar embarrassment hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector) | usagoldmines.com

• One Reddit user accidentally activated Emergency SOS and shared a naked video of themself with their emergency contacts
• This embarrassing (and amusing) story has made some consider turning Emergency SOS off on their Android phone
• You could instead change your SOS settings to make it harder to activate, or set it to not share video and audio

Emergency SOS features on our phones have been cited as being life-saving, but accidental activations could be life-ruining if you have an experience like that of one unlucky Reddit user, who accidentally sent their 12 emergency contacts a naked video of themself. Thankfully, you don’t need to switch the setting off to help you avoid the same embarrassment.

The ordeal occurred over the weekend when, in an effort to switch off their morning phone alarm, user AssistancePretend668 says they accidentally activated Emergency SOS – they suspect by pressing their phone’s power button five times. The alarm became a whirring siren and their phone screen alerted them that it was calling 911 and sending out information to their emergency contacts.

They scrambled to cancel Emergency SOS, but in doing so picked up their phone without knowing the feature starts capturing a video which it then sends to all of their emergency contacts. Combine this with the fact that the user says they sleep without any clothes on, and the result is their contacts were sent a video of their friend completely naked.

If you want a good laugh, the full post on Reddit and the replies in the thread are worth a read – especially knowing that after the situation was explained everyone involved also found it hilarious – but you might well be wondering what you can do to avoid finding yourself in a similar situation.

How to change your Emergency SOS settings

Some obvious, but not overly useful, suggestions would be to switch off Emergency SOS, use a different device as your alarm, or to always sleep with clothes on, but there are some Emergency SOS settings you can change instead to help you avoid disaster.

One is setting your phone to require a secondary action after pressing your power button five times before it goes into emergency mode, instead of this being automatic. On Pixel this requires you to touch and hold an icon on your phone screen for a couple of seconds, while on Samsung this requires you to swipe up on the phone symbol onscreen, as when answering a call.

A second option is to change which details emergency contacts receive. If you’d prefer, you can set it so that your device won’t send audio recordings, pictures, or video of your emergency to contacts. The disadvantage of turning this off is that these auto recordings make it easy to show and explain your situation without needing to type out a bespoke message – so keep that in mind if you are thinking of turning it off.

A third option is changing who’s on your emergency contacts list so you limit who receives your details and videos. All three of these settings can be tweaked in your Settings app – search for Emergency SOS and then alter the settings in the Emergency SOS and Emergency Sharing sub-menus.

A final suggestion is to turn on your phone’s ability to switch off an alarm simply by telling it “Stop”. This runs the risk of your still half-asleep self cutting your alarm off early, but because it’s a hands-free approach you won’t run the risk of accidentally inputting your Emergency SOS . Though it can be temperamental, and if “Stop” doesn’t work you will still need to take a more hands-on approach to switching off your alarm.

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